“People must take responsibility for their actions, let Okonjo call a public debate” – Fashola Challenge

Babatunde Fashola, challenged the minister of finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, over her comment that the states are responsible for their inability to pay salaries to a public debate.

The outgoing Lagos state governor, who spoke during an interview with journalists from select media houses, added that the debate would enable the public to understand that the country made a budget on the basis of certain assumptions.

Fashola said: “I won’t want to have a public debate with the Finance Minister because if it was a matter she was willing to debate, let her call a meeting and we will have a public debate on it. I think the sense for the public to understand is that the country made a budget on the basis of certain assumptions. There was a national budget. Those assumptions have become unrealistic.

“If you are leading a family, and your children or members of your household trust you or trust your leadership, and you say that these are the things that you expect to happen; that this road is safe, let us walk it together and that road turns out to be unsafe because the nation did not earn enough, so your assumptions were faulty and what the nation earned is mired in debate and controversy about how accurate the accounting has been in terms of oil proceeds and sales.

“Is it morally right to say it was the fault of the children that they couldn’t go to school when the revenue and resources to go to school had been halved because you led them to believe that this amount would come in? I think the time has come when people must take responsibility for their actions and to say ‘you know what, I got this wrong. I am sorry.’

“It is possible for the uninformed members of the public to misunderstand that statement and think that they couldn’t pay salaries because they didn’t want to pay. But the admission you must first make is that their income has declined. Let us go forward and all of us must understand this: the money that goes to each state from the federation account is for the entire state, not for the public service.

According to Fashola, the money from the federal government to the states is not just to pay salaries alone but also for water, road, security and other things. “After paying salaries, government cannot fold its hands to security and it cannot close its eyes to health care issues. It seems to me that if there were more revenue, the states would not be in this position. That does not suggest that all the right choices have been made,” he stated.

He added: “I think the larger issue that I want to address is that it provokes us to rethink the viability of the current state structure. When the debate for the creation of more states started, one of the things I said was that I did not think we should have more states. One of things I said – and I think I was the only one who said it – was that it was time for people to think out of the box; that the states that felt they were not viable on their own could merge.

“Some people had some scathing words for me on that matter. But the way I view life is that if you unbundle something and it does not work, you must have the courage to put it back. And we cannot entrap ourselves that there is no other answer. The same way that we put back the decentralised Police Force many years ago, we are now afraid to unbundle it again. But it is not working. This is the way that I think public trust and even our private lives should be.”

Okonjo-Iweala had about two weeks back revealed that Nigeria had no money to pay salaries to government workers, blaming the falling oil prices for the situation.

A group, the Centre for Social Justice, had also urged a federal high court in Abuja to send Okonjo-Iweala to jail for contempt of court.